


Wake

by fewlmewn (Shouriko)



Series: D&D Original Stories [7]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Character Study, Child Death, Deal with a Devil, Death, Grief/Mourning, Mind Manipulation, Plague, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 08:39:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17846090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shouriko/pseuds/fewlmewn
Summary: All it takes to break the world is one man. All it takes to break a man is the Light.





	Wake

We see a vast expanse of dry brush – broken trees and splintered wooden fences lying forgotten between small hovels at the edge of the desert. A few small critters skitter past, but there’s something off about them. A two-headed lizard-like creature darts past, hiding in the shadow of a broken well, a four-winged carrion crow screams in the emptiness of this ghost town, signaling the height of noon, echoing across the valley and to the mountain foothills.

Inside one of these homes is a family, or what is left of it. A child, much too small for his age and wearing stained night robes two sizes too large lays in bed with his mother. Both have blistering welts across their skin; nasty, purulent rashes cover their arms, and both cough incessantly in the too-quiet bedroom. Huddled together, they lazily look around, their gazes crossing from the sickly green sky outside, to the worm-worn wood beams, to the burly man sitting on a rickety stool next to the bed. They’re on their last legs and they know it, struggling to stay awake. The man clutches a handkerchief, long stained with blood, so much so that there’s barely a clean corner on it. With every new wet cough, the square of once-white fabric turns redder, and redder, and redder, until there’s so much blood and crimson phlegm on it that the man’s hands become stained themselves.

The house looks like it’s been ransacked – a shell with no much furniture to speak of, but plenty of memories. Carved wooden figurines litter the floor where they’ve been abandoned, pots and pans with leftover food in various states of rot populate the kitchen counter and the dinner table. A throw blanket lays unfinished on the ground, two shiny metal knitting needles crisscrossed over the weave. But it hasn’t been ransacked, just emptied out, in a last ditch attempt to find the best cures and medicine a man can possibly get ahold of in a place like this, on the edge of civilization. It’s several weeks’ travel to any major city, and the locals are dropping like flies, handfuls with each passing day.

The sky overhead is still storm-gray, but more than that, it’s still streaked with the same ribbons of pale green that first appeared a little over a week ago. When the man arrived home after a months-long shift in the mines, this is the sky that greeted him. In horror, he had to see what sickness that sky had wrought upon his town when he finally made his way back home. The young ones – much weaker than the others – had fallen sick first. Against all reasonable thought, however, they were also the ones that survived the longest, battling with an invisible, cruel foe for days before finally expiring. The adults had stayed around longer; unaware of the sickness seeping into their bones, they tended to the ones hit by this unknown plague until they, too, started showing the signs of the disease.

The man had been lucky to not have been around when the cataclysm had happened. But to outlive your wife and child is something that no one would wish upon their greatest enemy. And yet, here he sits – miraculously untouched by the plague that brought the town to its knees, chasing his beloved’s absent gaze, and whispering sweet words to his son, trying desperately to make him hear how much he loves him in his final moments, even when he knows the poor boy is probably too distracted by the body failing him to pay attention to much at all.

In the end, when they’re both gone, and the house is as empty as the day he first purchased it with the intent of making it into a home, the man has to leave. He doesn’t want to try his luck any longer than he absolutely has to by staying around this cursed place. He painstakingly digs a ditch large enough for the both of them while sweating under the bright white midsummer’s sun – the sky is not as green, now – and finally lays his wife and child to rest.

Within the week, the man will walk to the closest village, and buy the cheapest horse his leather boots can get him. The skin peels away from his sunburnt cheeks, but he pays that no mind as he races to the tower in the middle of the desert. Buried in the sand, legend says a powerful mage, a lonesome hermit, inhabits the limestone tower. Shielded by powerful illusions and mirages that could confound the most experienced traveller, the building is unfathomable. But the man has to try. He doesn’t have much time and surely he doesn’t have the coin to enlist the legendary mage’s help, but he’ll lay down his life if that means he could bring them back.

 

The deal he strikes is the cruelest thing he’s ever heard. He used to be a miner, he never hit anything in his life, never hurt anybody. He had never even thrown a punch before. But now his hands are stained with blood. ”Life beckons Life”, the mage had said. The contract had to be signed in blood and the moment the page turned to ash he knew. He just did. He didn’t know how, he wasn’t one for letters or theological studies and yet he knew what he’d gotten himself into. The man was the Devil, must’ve been. And now he had to take Life in order to return his family. How many? As many as it takes. “The worth of one can be weighted from the worth of many”. The parchment had turned to dust, or it had been spirited away to the Hells, and now it was too late to change his mind. In the end, as he went from town to town looking for a mark, the man reasoned with himself that his wife and child deserved it. It was too late to stop, he’d given his word, so at least all he had was the absolute certainty that his family was worth the sins he was committing.

And yet, after the first one – a known thug who was known to harass the women of the village he’d settled in – he heard a voice in the back of his head whisper, just barely audible past the adrenaline and blood pumping in his veins from taking his first life of many, “Not enough”.

Many years pass, and the man goes from village to village, killing nearly everyone in his path. Anything to make the voice in his head stop mocking and taunting him. “Not enough”. Not enough. Not enough not enough not enough never NEVER enough.

 

Before long, he forgot why he’s doing this. A group of bandits saw the perfect opportunity and banded with him, looking to make easy gains wherever their leader would lead them. Him, the ruthless killing machine, bent on conquering every settlement before him, no matter how small or downtrodden or isolated – he left nothing in his wake.

He just left a never-ending ribbon of blood behind him.

He left a Red Creek.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is supposed to be the "Origin story" for The Red Creek, which you can read more about in my other work "A Tale of Exploration and Adventuring". The story is also supposed to tie in with sort of the endgame I'm planning for this homebrewed world I'm creating out of thin air (A.K.A. my ass).  
> So, enjoy and feel free to leave a comment or tell me if you liked it!  
> P.S: As always this was written between 2 and 4 AM and nothing has been proofread and I have no Beta reader, so if you wanna volunteer hey! Hit me up!


End file.
